Since
its founding in 1881, the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf along with the
Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen have been devoted to
current artistic production. Contemporary modern art was the focus even
at the original museum in its Classicist building. In addition to
important artists such as Cézanne, van Gogh, Monet, Renoir, Rodin,
Kirchner, Schmidt-Rottluff, Pechstein, Nolde, Kandinsky, and Matisse,
legendary Sonderbund exhibitions took place at the museum in 1909 and
1911.

In 1967 the building, which had been severely damaged in
the war, was torn down and rebuilt as a brutalist concrete cube on
Grabbeplatz by the architects Beckmann and Brockes. On 30 April 2017,
the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf will celebrate its fiftieth anniversary in the
building on Grabbeplatz.

From the beginning, the museum on
Grabbeplatz was conceived as an institution for very different and
idiosyncratic exhibition formats, which have focused on an “expanded
concept of art” and interdisciplinary approaches under the aegis of Karl
Ruhrberg, Jürgen Harten, Ulrike Groos, and Gregor Jansen. It has been
conceived as a venue for the local art scene as well as international
contemporary art projects, as demonstrated by legendary

The large number of over 500
exhibitions have significantly shaped the institution’s identity as an
exhibition venue for cutting-edge contemporary art. In this anniversary
year, the fact that such programmatic and pioneering exhibitions took
place here very early on and continue to take place today will be
reflected on art-historically against the background of the changing
values during this period.

The first of a total of four
programmatic exhibitions in this anniversary year bears the title
Economic Values / Museum Values and

explicitly examines the history of
the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf since its reestablishment—in the same spirit
as PROSPECTRETROSPECT, but from today’s perspective. Movements and
positions of artists and works exhibited then which were cutting-edge,
experimental, and barely or not at all established at the time are now
largely part of

international museum collections and have thus become
canonized. The focus of this exhibition is the period from 1966 to 1981.
In close collaboration with the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst in
Ghent (S.M.A.K., reestablished in 1980), we will present a selection of
works from the collection of a musée imaginaire. The point of

departure
will be artworks that uniquely reflect and document the “spirit” and the
European interconnections between the Belgian and German art scenes
within this generation of artists. The particular geostrategic situation
of the Rhineland and its neighbors of the Netherlands and Belgium will
be a particular focus. Geographic proximity along with differences,
conceptual and sensory interests, and fruitful encounters between
artists, gallerists, collectors, and institutions will form the
conceptual backdrop of the exhibition. Düsseldorf, Krefeld,
Mönchengladbach, Leverkusen, and Cologne in Germany, and Eindhoven,
Antwerp, Brussels, and Ghent to the west have engaged in a continual
exchange. The reestablishment of galleries such as Wide White Space
(1966 in Antwerp) and Konrad Fischer Galerie (1967 in Düsseldorf) were
manifestations of this new orientation.

The work that gives the
exhibition its name is the installation Wirtschaftswerte (Economic
Values) by Joseph Beuys, which was first shown in 1980 in Ghent in the
exhibition Art in Europe after 1968. The work consists of food products
typical of the German Democratic Republic on sparsely stocked, simple
iron shelves as a counter-image to the surplus of products at
supermarkets in the West. It is a critique of a society based on
disposable goods and the misuse of resources that are essential to life,

one of which Beuys believed was human creativity. The shelves are
framed by classic paintings from the collection of the Museum
Kunstpalast from Karl Marx’s day.Another important work from that
time is the Ikonenraum that Imi Knoebel realized in Ghent, which is now
presented as the Genter Raum (Ghent Room) in the collection of

the state
of North Rhine-Westphalia at K21. Works from the legendary S.M.A.K.
exhibition Art in Europe after 1968 and the museum’s
collections—including pieces by Yves Klein and Andy Warhol—further
expand the breadth of artworks from this period, while also exemplifying
the central difference between a Kunsthalle (an exhibition venue

without a collection) and a museum that can acquire artworks for a
public collection.

The exhibition Marcel Broodthaers: A
Retrospective that will take place simultaneously at K21, featuring the
multifaceted work of the Belgian artist (1924–1976), will draw attention
in Düsseldorf to another central and still relevant contemporary.
Broodthaers’s oeuvre, which took shape amid Pop Art, Minimalism, and
Conceptual Art, represents a highly critical and idiosyncratic position
within the avant-garde art scene. His institutional-critical
installations and cinematographic works are also paradigmatic of this
time and of the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, which devoted several exhibitions
to Broodthaers. In 1972, for the first time he exhibited his Department
of Eagles in full, which is now part of the art collection of the state
of North Rhine-Westphalia. In 2010 the Kunsthalle along with the
Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen presented an homage to him
in Real Presences: Marcel Broodthaers Today.

With the exhibition
Economic Values / Museum Values, the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf will
temporarily become a venue for a museum exhibition and will thus also
focus on the current question of the value and perception of
institutions with and without their own collections. The changes in
values in museums, the art system, and society since the

1960s as well
as the question of the critical approach to this history and its
significance for artists play a role. In the past fifty years, a radical
change has occurred in all areas of our society, three examples of
which are the 1968 student movement, the collapse of the Eastern bloc,
and the digital revolution. Likewise, the

boom in museums since around
1980 and major exhibitions such as Westkunst, von hier aus, and
Bilderstreit, the marked increase in the “eventification” of culture,
along with a boom in art fairs, biennales, the new role of cultural
sponsorship, the move of the federal government in Germany from the
Rheinland to the new “creative

center” of Berlin, and debates about a
so-called “victors’ art” (Wolfgang Ullrich) and many other topics have
ushered in a change in values that has barely been understood in all its
dimensions, in which art is lent a rather negative connotation as a
product, decoration, or an object of prestige or speculation: art =
capital.

Like Joseph Beuys in his day, today we aim to positively
direct people’s gaze to the life-sustaining and healing qualities of
the “nourishment or fuel” that is art in order to sensitize them to a
more conscious approach to (these) valuable and value-building
resources, especially in a time of increasingly senseless waste.

The
exhibition will also feature a temporary installation that points to
our approach to time in the continuation of On Kawara’s ONE MILLION
YEARS – PAST AND FUTURE from 1969, which will be read by two people in
parallel in the exhibition.